Small Victories

This might sound crazy -- check that -- this very much sounds crazy, buy my Dad took his first actual shower in many years today.  After four days of brutal heat, I was able to talk him into a "cool" shower.

It went much better than I expected.  I helped him in and out, but he did pretty well on his own for the actual washing part.

He said it felt good.  I said he could do this whenever he wants to feel good and clean and refreshed.  He doesn't need to exist in "scarcity mode" if he doesn't want to.  (We run water off of a somewhat shallow well, but it's honestly not that expensive to have it re-filled when needed.)

It's also 10:45 in the morning and I'm exhausted.

Unruly Sun

As I said to my Dad over bowls of leftover Father's Day ice cream last night, "We made it."

For the past three days, record setting heat was recorded in Portland, Seattle, and Bellingham.

It was fucking brutal of course.  Sleeping in your own sweat is only on very specific occasions a nice thing, and even then you'll want AC.

This Fourth of July weekend my sister is visiting, and I'm planning on buying a car.

It should only hit 80 today, and it will be very dry the rest of the summer.  Unlike Seattle, we don't get much rain up here in the warmer months.

Hot Hot Heat

 

Bellingham, Washington.

Booze

Since I moved back to America in February I'd say my daily exercise level has improved just a bit over my routine in Korea.  About six months before I left Daegu my exercise bike gave up the ghost, so I started taking one hour to ninety minute walks daily around my town.  If I was in the office, I took to getting up every 30 to 45 minutes and doing 1,000 steps up and down the hallways and stairs.

It's easier here in the middle of nowhere, Whatcom County.  Every morning I've walked my Dad's private road two kilometers each way, then another kilometer around the house pulling up weeds or branches.

I don't see six-pack abs in my future, alas, but I feel like I'm getting at least 90 minutes of decent movement every day without fail.  (I missed one day back in February due to snow, but I shoveled enough of it to make up.)

And since I'm trying to be honest, I'm also drinking very little alcohol these days.  This is a huge change from Korea, when I would regularly stop in for two tallboys of Korean or Japanese beer on my way home from work, and more on the weekends.

My Dad still drinks very cheap red jug wine, but much less than he used to.  And this is more than understandable at 92, because one decent-sized glass will put him to bed pretty quickly.  I'm actually treating myself to a beer as I type this, but since I've come back from Asia (almost five months) I've gone through exactly 36 beers total (three cases), with 12 sitting in the pantry right now.  (My sister is visiting soon, but she'll at most have one when she gets here.)

I'm 46 of course.  I couldn't drink like my younger self even if I wanted to.  (I'll admit, there are times when I want to.)

All of this is to say, I'm feeling pretty good on the physical front.  I've lost a little bit of weight but was honestly hoping to have lost more given that I'm drinking (almost) nothing but well water, and a cup of instant coffee in the morning (Dad's preference).

Living out here isn't easy but at least my liver is thankful.

"wild with freedom"

"The second fight was good, too.  The crowd screamed and roared and swilled beer.  They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes -- they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out -- they were wild with freedom.  They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty.  Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps.  The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements."

-- Charles Bukowski, Women

Heat Wave

There's a heat warning in effect for Western Washington starting tomorrow, Friday, and lasting until Monday.

We should be fine, but I'll make sure the Old Man drinks enough water.

While L.A. folks might scoff at all this (only 95?) you have to remember that most homes in this area don't have central A.C.  Other than two weeks out of the year at most you generally don't need it.

Anyhow, it'll be hot but thankfully my Dad left up most of the trees around his house to provide shade.  You'd be surprised at how many of his neighbors did not.

"with a bad joke written over His head"

"That was not for her to know, either.  God worked discreetly, and in the ways that pleased Him.  It had pleased Him that the Children of Israel should sweat and strain under the Egyptian yoke for generations.  It had pleased Him to send Joseph into slavery, his fine coat of many colors ripped rudely from his back.  It had pleased Him to allow the visitation of a hundred plagues on hapless Job, and it had pleased Him to allow His only Son to be hung up on a tree with a bad joke written over His head.

God was a gamesman -- if He had been a mortal, He would have been at home hunkering over a checkerboard on the porch of Pop Mann's general store back in Hemingford Home.  He played red to black, white to black.  She thought that, for Him, the game was more than worth the candle, the game was the candle.  He would prevail in His own good time.  But not necessarily this year, or in the next thousand. . . and she would not overestimate the dark man's craft and cozening.  If he was neon gas, then she was the tiny dark dust particle a great raincloud forms about over the parched land.  Only another private soldier -- long past retirement age, it was true! -- in the service of the Lord."

-- Stephen King, The Stand

"piety, chastity, charity, your company"

 

Drive Like Jehu, "New Math"

Things continue apace here in lonely, quiet Bellingham.  I'm doing some research for a mobile phone plan (yes, I still piggyback off of my Dad's landline these days) and a car.  It's tough though -- while the Old Man won't admit that he needs full-time care, he does.  But he also wants me to get a job, which is totally fair, but that means I need a car (pretty easy) and to leave the house a lot (again, he thinks it's fine, but the moment he can't get FOX News to come up and have me fix it for him there'll be hell to pay).

This stuff is hard.  When he retired back in the early 90's he wanted to move as far away from D.C., and cities in general, as possible.  And for a long while, having him live in the middle of nowhere had its advantages.  But now, the isolation is a problem.

As they say, be careful what you wish for.

Turn, Turn, Turn

My dad moved here from the D.C. area in 1994, as part of the "first generation" out here on this private road.  What's interesting is that times change, and older folks have moved on in their different ways.  I guess that makes me and my sister "second generation" out here, but eventually I see myself moving back to the D.C. area.  It's a lovely place, but I know nobody in Whatcom County, or Seattle or Vancouver for that matter.  It's not mine.  D.C., even though it's been a while since I've lived there full time, still is.  And some bits around it too, including Baltimore.

This is a roundabout way of saying, I'm pretty sure I heard a hippie drum circle in full swing about two houses away last night.

Things have definitely changed.  (To balance it out, my Dad's immediate neighbor is an ex-Navy lifer.  And at this point in my life I probably have more in common with him than I do hairy pot-smokers.)

Hater

I really like Lorde, but I don't go to her music looking for "summertime banger."

That is my hate-y music comment for today.

Thank you for your time.

"not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice"

To ban discussions of uber-scary "Critical Race Theory" is to ban discussions of racism in America and, by necessity, the works of -- Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Langston Hughes.

That's a very cursory start, of course.

And this is America, of course.

"an element of madness in this plan"

"Now the connection you have been waiting for is suddenly made.  You can now remember the route from here to the Lexington Market.  You can remember the names of streets from here to there.  You plan now is to get some crabcakes, and find some way to keep them fresh enough to survive the trip back to Iowa.  You will need ice and a plastic cooler.  And you will need luck in shipping the plastic cooler on two different flights.  There is an element of madness in this plan, but it also contains a certain boldness that you have not felt in many years.  You determine to do it."

-- James Alan McPherson, Crabcakes

Programming Notes

I've really appreciated the feedback and encouragement on what's shaping up to be -- gasp! -- my first novel, The Give and The Take.  I've been writing a lot, much more than I expected, since I got out here in February to take care of my Dad.  The subject matter is, of course, pretty damn obvious.  But I do feel as if the project has arrived at an important point -- a good point -- where it would be best to keep my first drafts more private, less public.  For a while though it really felt good to get something out there, even if this blog doesn't get a whole lot of readers (Quality over Quantity!).  It's funny living in the middle of nowhere -- on the one hand I'm surprised, daily, by something, something the Old Man says or does, or talking to a neighbor.  But it is lonely out here -- there's no other word for it -- and the gates of my memory are more greased-up than usual, and have been for months.  There's no telling what ghosts, friendly or otherwise, will walk out and start yapping at me at any given time.

I was keeping notebooks in South Korea but rarely taking the time to go back and give that material the editorial muscle it really needed to be shaped into something worth sharing.  A few good bits of it have made their way into The Give and The Take, and will continue to do so.  But while I'm going to keep that stuff "private" for now, I am going to start posting some of my short stories on this here blog.  At some point I'll even polish them up and send them out for potential publication, but I know from experience that that whole dance takes work, and you can't half-ass it the way you can popping up an eight page short story online.

For what it's worth, I wrote poetry for many years but basically stopped around the half-way mark of my time in Korea, around 2013 or so.  There were a number of reasons, but none more important than the fact that I haven't really read much poetry since then either, and don't miss it all that much.

So my longer work is going into the garage and I'm lowering the doors for now, but hopefully you'll be entertained by some of my recent efforts in writing stories.  And, for better or worse, they aren't all about my ten years living in South Korea!

"Chicago was still a thousand miles away"

"So I sat at the desk every night, learning less biology, dreaming the dream over and over, until one night I looked at my respectable -- nevertheless Woolworth -- slacks, and realized that the freight trains no longer slowed down at Rock Camp.  There was always the bus, but in all three times I collected enough pop bottles for a ticket to where the train slowed down, the pool balls would break in my ears, and quarters would slip away into slots of time and chance.

'You can't see the angles,' Chester said to me one day after he ran the table in less than a minute.

I was in the tenth grade and didn't give two shits for his advice.  All I knew was all my quarters were gone, there were no more pop bottles along the Pike, and Chicago was still a thousand miles away.  I just leaned on my stick: I was sheared and I knew it."

-- Breece D'J Pancake, "The Salvation of Me"

(Former) Watering Hole

 

The former Little Roadside Tavern, Nugent's Corner, Washington.

When my Old Man moved out here to build a house he came across this bar, which closed down a few years ago apparently.  Over my visits during the past 20 years I think I was actually in here two or three times total.  Our neighbor was a regular ("I just go to play pool," says the functioning alcoholic) and strangely enough it plays a small role in the book Lone Patriot by Jane Kramer, about the right-wing militia movement here in Whatcom County during the nineties.

My Dad likes his red wine, but he isn't very social.  He was probably in this place only a few more times than I ever was.

Still, it's kind of sad all the same.  I'll be curious to see if someone buys and reopens it.

Getting The Pfizer Pfshot

I'm getting my second and final shot this Friday.  It's hard to believe last March of 2020 I was in Daegu and preparing to teach my college classes online.  My adult classes were cancelled for one semester, then taught again in person with masks and appropriate social distancing for the second.

I'm glad the health authorities have done a good job here in America (I'm shocked that South Korea is actually behind the U.S. when it comes to getting shots in arms) but my overwhelming feeling is just one of plain tiredness.

Granted, providing fulltime care for my Dad isn't really doing much to find me new wellsprings of energy either.

But he's gotten his shots (months ago) and I'll be done this Friday.  Given the rapid increase in climate-related issues, I'm guessing our next "100 Year Virus" will come in about five or ten years.

Good times, as always.

And apparently I qualify for a single marijuana joint in Washington State.  If I didn't live with my Old Man I'd definitely take them up on it.

I think the last time I smoked pot was in Charlottesville in 2002 or so.

'died noisily'

"At 3:00 a.m. on August 31, planes were heard overhead, and moments later canisters of supplies and weapons began drifting down to the drop zone, followed by Franks and his men.  Then pandemonium erupted.  One canister filled with ammunition exploded as it hit the ground.  The maquis [French resistance] began looting the supplies before teh SAS men [British special operations] had even landed.  In the confusion, the captive Fouch seized a Sten gun and rushed off.  The Russians, who spoke some German but not French, shouted 'Achtung!'  The French, hearing German voices in the darkness, assumed they must be under attack and began shooting wildly.  The looters meanwhile were gorging themselves, 'One Frenchman died of over-eating,' Druce recorded.  Another of the maquis extracted what the took to be a hunk of soft cheese from one of the containers and devoured it, only to discover it was plastic explosive, which contains arsenic.  He then 'died noisily.'"

-- Ben Macintyre, Rogue Heroes

"one long wheeze and rattle"

"The world was an ugly place.  It was the ugliness of things that had gone crooked and were now twisted out of all meaning.  It was a deformity that began with houses that had been badly matched to the bodies they held, being too small, or too windy or cracked open to the rain like the careless laying of an egg on sharp rocks.  Then there were the bodies themselves.  In the cruel confinements of their lives they had grown awry.  The very effort of living was a pain.  You could hear it in your bed at night if your ears had been sharpened enough by disgust.  The world was one long wheeze and rattle as it laboured uncertainly in sleep.  Butcher's hands were another living embodiment of this reality.  So too the dead face of Gumboot Dhlamini, the one they had taken on the trains.  It was true of all life.  The only trees in the township, those around the cemetery, had expressed it in their stunted growth, drawing out the full meaning in their misshapen silhouettes seen against the windy sky.  It amounted to the basic horror of existence."

-- Athol Fugard, Tsotsi

"shaking every step of the way"

"Goody Nelson continued to chortle long after Hazard had gone.  It was still a world full of wonder.  Wildman, for chrissake!  Had he or Clell -- or even Jack, who had been the man's squad leader, after all -- been remiss in not spotting seeds of greatness in the fast little fuck?  No.  There was never any way to tell beforehand.  Courage under fire came from all sorts, the smart as well as the smart-ass, the steadfast as well as the moral coward.  Winners and losers.  The Army had actually commissioned studies of Medal of Honor winners, their behavior before the act, trying to find patterns or tendencies.  It had been a waste of taxpayers' money.  Great physical bravery was often nothing more than a nervous response to a desperate situation, the unthinking, impulsive act of a man who thought he had nothing to lose.  On the face of it, you'd expect somebody like Willow to be a candidate for heroism, but you'd be wrong.  Willow would do fine, he guessed, but Jack was cursed with the worst disease a man could carry into combat: a good imagination.  Fear came easiest to those who could clearly imagine all the horrible possibilities.  Most heroes were dull clods.  People like Clell were the real heroes, scared shitless but still able to function with professionalism, still doing whatever had to be done.  Men like Clell, and him, too, had earned their medals the hard way, shaking every step of the way."

-- Nicholas Proffitt, Gardens of Stone

"indefinite wandering through strange places"

"To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and indefinite wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time they would hold on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon end they would camp, here and there, the dogs loafing and the men burning holes through frozen muck and gravel and washing countless pans of dirt by the heat of the fire. Sometimes they went hungry, sometimes they feasted riotously, all according to the abundance of game and the fortune of hunting. Summer arrived, and dogs and men packed on their backs, rafted across blue mountain lakes, and descended or ascended unknown rivers in slender boats whipsawed from the standing forest.

The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through the uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if the Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards, shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. In the fall of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad and silent, where wild-fowl had been, but where then there was no life nor sign of life—only the blowing of chill winds, the forming of ice in sheltered places, and the melancholy rippling of waves on lonely beaches."

-- Jack London, The Call of the Wild

"digging up blackberry roots and drinking beer"

"When young writers ask me, with that starry, glazed look they get in their eyes, What's the most important thing for a young writer to know or do?, I tell them, without exception (unless their daddy owns Macy's), to try and find a rent-controlled apartment.

Unlike the young aspiring artists and writers today, gathering in places like San Francisco's Mission District and Brooklyn back east, working long hours in hateful jobs to make rent, I as able to pretty much fake it through my thirties, grabbing scut work here and there when necessary.  Come to think of it, during that decade I spent an awful lot of time digging up blackberry roots and drinking beer in the backyard.  I suppose that's the reason, as the trombonist upstairs goes through her scales this morning, a noise most would probably find intrusive or annoying, I find it to be music to my ears."

-- August Kleinzahler, Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs